Raising Johan and François

Miss Self-Important alerted me to something "combining amy chua with skinny frenchwomen," so I had to look, and before even knowing what it was, to kick myself for having not thought of it. What it is is another WSJ attack, by a Real Mom, on American parenting. (America being, let's be clear, defined as a caricatured version of Park Slope and Berkeley.) But this time, we're to emulate not Chinese moms, but French ones. There's even a video where the author, Pamela Druckerman, a woman who's been living in Frahnce for a decade, wears a beret, as if to announce that she knows this is a gimmick and has no intention of breaking character until the gimmick goes platinum.

(I defy anyone familiar with the RHONY not to look at the photo accompanying the article, with the three blond, baffled-looking kids in berets, and not immediately think of Alex and Simon, Johan and François, and the quest of one American woman and one Australian man to raise French children in New York. Druckerman's husband is British, close enough. Druckerman, however, has a background in comedy. She's in on the joke.)

This concept is of course all kinds of brilliant: a certain type of (book-buying) American women is preoccupied with parenting and with being more French. Why not combine the two?

Part of me knows, on some level, that my familiarity with France is one day going to have to be channeled into a book of this variety, one that takes the following for granted: Everything not America is Europe. All of Europe is France. France is Paris, and Paris is that bit of the city between the St. Germain Monoprix and the Bon Marché. That which wouldn't be readily observed by Americans on a five-day vacation can be assumed not to exist. My entry into this genre will be a parody take called "Why French Women Are Better Than You, You Vache: A Francophilic Guide to Self-Hatred," but this is but one parody manuscript of many in the works at WWPD Industries.

In all seriousness, some of what Druckerman says about French eating is true, in my experience, in France beyond Paris; in Belgium; possibly everywhere that isn't the U.S.. It's not true that picky eating is uniquely American and magically eliminated with "French" parenting, but the idea that there are specific times to eat, and beyond that, specific foods that can be eaten at specific times, is a place where Americans find ourselves the odd ones out. (It seems strange to The Europeans that if I happen to have baked something - brownies, lemon pound cake, whatever - I see this as a perfectly acceptable breakfast, and that if I'm hungry at 5pm, or 10, that's when I'll have dinner.)

While my Americanness in this area has never caused me any real problems,* I can see how, on a population level, limiting food in this way would have some tangible benefits (less obesity-related illness, more self-control, etc.). On the other hand, cultural rules like these strike me as being part of an exclusionary system more broadly, and if they happen to be useful in certain isolated ways, they serve to make newcomers and even not-so-newcomers feel unwelcome. And that's kind of the gist of the argument. Druckerman says that French parenting - not just eating - works better because everyone does things the same way - there aren't competing ideas of (or parenting books about) how to do things right. This is less stressful, she claims. Perhaps, but rigidly enforced homogeneity is plenty stressful for outsiders as well as dissenters.

And this is the flaw with the whole Be More French genre - Frenchwomen-as-in-rich-Parisians may look chic, but they're all dressed identically to one another. You can either bemoan the fact that everyone around you (in suburban NJ, to give a purely theoretical example) would be out-of-place at the organic market on Raspail, or you can be grateful for the diversity of options.

Oh, and are French children better-behaved? No. They are, however, more elegantly dressed. If there isn't "kid food" in France-as-in-posh-Paris, nor is there kid clothing. Tiny children are dressed like precious dolls from the nineteenth century, and then around early adolescence, boys and girls alike are dressed indistinguishably from their adult equivalents. For better or worse, they do not spend a decade or even so much as a week experimenting with hipster/goth/punk, etc. Thus the city's lack of neon hair dye. This parenting guide is going to be a bestseller in no time.

*I can't write about this without mentioning the "trough" incident - when I said to a group of European acquaintances from a bunch of different countries, who were discussing American versus European eating habits that me personally, I eat out of a trough... and met with knowing nods. Part of this was a language issue (sarcasm being a tough tone to convey, "trough" a bit agricultural), but I also think it struck those present that it was totally plausible that this was how I took my meals. I could provide so many more anecdotes along these lines, but I've long noticed that the idea that Americans are fat and lazy is so ingrained that they have essentially nothing to do with whether any particular American is either.